Meanwhile, scientists have pretty much concluded that we’ve pretty much fucked up the Earth, fished ourselves toward starvation, made the seas ripe for algae and jellyfish, won’t have enough energy to grow the food we largely waste, can’t keep using energy this way, and can’t afford to live this way anyhow. I don’t care if it’s global warming, global weirding, climate change, Nature Batting Last, Keanu Reeves playing a robotic Al Gore (like that’s a stretch,) or the end of the world. We’ve just got to stop being wasteful assholes who think we can go on living this way.

Won’t change a goddamn thing if people accept global warming or not. Anyone who doesn’t forsee huge problems with water, energy, food, population, and the environment just isn’t paying attention. It’s not as if our economy relies on any of that stuff anyway. Right?

Self-interest is unreliable for some things, for example: some people would rather have a fast nickle than a slow dime. How did that self-interest thing workout for the mortgage bubble?
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I’d agree that dire prophecies are a bit much, but don’t bet on self-interest of all to operate in the common interest….

Human ingenuity isn’t going to replace all of that oil and natural gas. There’s nothing in the pipeline other than frugality that can get us through the coming shortage. Not nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, ethanol, or anything else. They’ll all help (and we better damn well continue trying,) but can never replace the amazing thing that oil is.

And I don’t have any illusions that people will sit idly by while all those resources disappear. Instead, I think people will freak out, horde things, steal them, and otherwise act like petulant asses on an international scale. There will be wars over oil, water, arable land, and all those other things we don’t admit the current problem areas of the world are suffering through.

We see tribalism (and other misreadings) in Africa rather than a freak out over poverty and scarce resources. We think they can end hunger by cooperation and other fru-fru concepts (only by combining the worst of racist imperialist thought and postmodern idealist thought can you get a profound misunderstanding at that level) when they’ve already decided that thievery is the better way, and the collateral damage only makes the thievery easier.

Stability and civilization require a level of commercial potential the world just isn’t full of right now, and maybe it always was a lie that it was there. I love idealism as much as the next guy, but I can’t help but look at the way things are set to blow up. Things will go bad in places like Pakistan, South America (Ecuador has just said “Fuck off, creditors!”,) Southeast Asia, and elsewhere before we really will have to start to begin to understand things as they really are. We’re a rich and lucky country and can survive the worst that’s headed our way, but I have no illusions that a transition to the post cheap-oil world will be easy. And in the rest of the world it will be damned unbearable.

The end of mankind isn’t in the works, though the end of our way of living could be. I think it has to be so we can preserve what’s really important. And I think that forcing people to make the necessary changes won’t work, at least in this country. We aren’t a humble people, but we better learn to at least fake it.